Kitchen Queries

Welcome to Kitchen Queries, where the nigella.com team will answer your cooking or food related questions. We’d love you to submit some of your recipe problems, dilemmas or queries for us to get our teeth into!

Please note, we are only able to answer questions selected for publication and aren't able to enter into personal correspondence.

Latest Queries

Jewelled Christmas Cake

A few years ago I made a Nigella quick Christmas cake with a glazed fruit topping. I can't seem to find the recipe again, please could you help? With thanks.

Posted by dorothy1. Answered on 8th Dec 2011 at 12.00

From the nigella team:

We suspect that the Christmas cake you are referring to is Nigella's Easy-Action Christmas Cake which appears in Feast (p92). This cake includes sweetened chestnut puree as well as more traditional ingredients and the fruits, nuts, sugar and butter are put in a saucepan and heated together, before bring left to stand and steep for a short period of time. Once the cake has been baked Nigella suggests decorating the cake with glazed (glace) fruits and brushing over a little thinned apricot jam. Nigella also makes this cake mixture into smaller Jewelled Cupcakes by baking the same cake mixture in cupcake cases.

The other fruit-topped offering is Nigella's version of an Italian delicacy known as Certosino. It appears in Domestic Goddess (p255). However this is a fairly thin cake and is usually served in very small wedges so is different to the more traditional type of Christmas cake.